“Slow down,” his father had told him gently. “Use your nose, mouth, and your ears, not just your measuring scales. Tap the metal scrap with a nail. Its ring will tell you what it’s made of. Chew the plastic to identify its grade. If it’s hard plastic, snap it in half and inhale. A fresh smell indicates good quality polyurethane.” (A lesson from Abdul’s father about the skills of trash picking in the slums. From “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death and hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” by Katherine Boo.)

April 25th. “It’s 92 degrees,” the captain says from the cockpit before we land. I can see the slums beside the runway, with children running and waving, as if they can catch us. We are going there as soon as we land.

Rakesh, a guide with Reality Tours, meets us at the bridge that goes over the train tracks and into Dharavi, a slum community build on reclaimed landfill 170 years ago, with 540,000 people per square kilometer and now boasts of being the industrial center where $2/day labor beats any other market in the world.

Mumbai is one of the major recipients of plastic waste from the US and Europe, and Dharavi is where a poor and eager workforce doesn’t complain. Through a maze of narrow alleys and raw sewage channels, we enter the plastic smelting zone, but we smell it first.